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Fine Print:Poet Sharon Olds Chronicles the End of Her Marriage in a New Collection

August 22, 2012 3:02 PM

Photographed by Marcus Mam, Vogue, September 2012

“I love writing about love,” says Sharon Olds, sitting down in the rambling Upper West Side apartment with a Hudson River view that she’s called home for 40 years. Love in all its shadings—joyous, erotic, even comedic—has always been a favorite theme for Olds, now nearly 70, though she looks a decade younger, lissome and vigorous, an amiably prim manner belying her delighted carnality. She remains one of the nation’s finest living poets, her work as propulsive and full-blooded—the critic Helen Vendler once called it “pornographic”—as it was in 1980, when she published her first collection, Satan Says. “It did not take the Puritan taboo to rouse my interest in the subject!” laughs Olds, when asked about the frankness on the matter of sex. “I was in tenth grade in Berkeley, California, when Allen Ginsberg wrote Howl and Other Poems. I carried it in my purse.”

The things Olds carries—the “hellfire” Calvinism she inherited and rejected, the song-of-the-self sixties she came of age in—are by now bedrock, and her stunning new collection, Stag’s Leap (Knopf), her most unified and vital work since 1992's The Father, finds both seeker and sensualist at their best. Describing the emotional trajectory of the year, 1997, that her husband of three decades left her for another woman, Olds moves from the intimacy of a long marriage, with its “hard sweets of femur and stone,” shared objets and domestic rituals—a haircut, a snooze on the sofa—to the “courtesy and horror” involved in its undoing. In the title poem, the speaker compares the deer emblazoned on a bottle of wine to her husband, “casting himself off a cliff in his fervor to get free of me”—and, with an astonishing generosity, cheers him on: “When anyone escapes, my heart/leaps up. Even when it’s I who am escaped from, I am half on the side of the leaver.”

Olds evokes the pained aftermath of his departure—“a flurry of tears like a wirra of knives thrown at a figure, to outline it”—in often blisteringly funny images. A French bra glimpsed in a lingerie shop window is no instrument of seduction, but rather a “silk biplane”; a photograph of a swimsuit-clad woman fished out of the laundry along with her husband’s running shorts is the “surprise trout of wash-day.” In a section entitled “Years Later,” her husband seems to float away, like a “Chagall bridegroom, without the faithfulness.”

“I was never good at being angry,” says Olds, who wrote hundreds of poems over the course of that year, 49 of which are included in the collection; out of deference to her children (a son and daughter, both grown), she waited a decade to publish them. “The right to be angry: I’m learning it now, and I must say I’m having a wonderful time learning it slowly—anger tends to be eloquent! But it’s also kind of scary.”

Olds is just as unstinting about her own shortcomings, even questioning what role her frankly autobiographical writing, as well as a tendency to idealize, might have played in the marriage’s end: “When I wrote about him, did he feel he had to walk around carrying my books on his head like a stack of posture volumes?” But it’s precisely her metabolic need to convert life into art that led her to compassion and acceptance. The collection confirms Olds as our foremost poet of the self in all its seasons, her songs of experience freshly resonant and honest in a literary era that’s obsessed with personal narrative but confused about its rules. Meanwhile, it’s clear that her future work will reflect a re-engagement in the world, both political—in 2005, she famously declined **Laura Bush’**s invitation to a book festival in an elegantly potent letter published in The Nation—and personal. She now splits her time between New York, where she has taught poetry at NYU for three decades and founded several outreach programs, and New Hampshire’s Wild Goose Pond, where her boyfriend lives. “I think poetry exists partly in order to sing the praises of who and what we love,” she says. “As well as for the purpose of showing us ourselves, at our worst as well as at our best.”

This is an expanded version of an article that appears in the September issue of Vogue. To read the rest of the issue, pick up a copy at newsstands now.